37,644 research outputs found
A New Framework for Distributed Submodular Maximization
A wide variety of problems in machine learning, including exemplar
clustering, document summarization, and sensor placement, can be cast as
constrained submodular maximization problems. A lot of recent effort has been
devoted to developing distributed algorithms for these problems. However, these
results suffer from high number of rounds, suboptimal approximation ratios, or
both. We develop a framework for bringing existing algorithms in the sequential
setting to the distributed setting, achieving near optimal approximation ratios
for many settings in only a constant number of MapReduce rounds. Our techniques
also give a fast sequential algorithm for non-monotone maximization subject to
a matroid constraint
High-performance Kernel Machines with Implicit Distributed Optimization and Randomization
In order to fully utilize "big data", it is often required to use "big
models". Such models tend to grow with the complexity and size of the training
data, and do not make strong parametric assumptions upfront on the nature of
the underlying statistical dependencies. Kernel methods fit this need well, as
they constitute a versatile and principled statistical methodology for solving
a wide range of non-parametric modelling problems. However, their high
computational costs (in storage and time) pose a significant barrier to their
widespread adoption in big data applications.
We propose an algorithmic framework and high-performance implementation for
massive-scale training of kernel-based statistical models, based on combining
two key technical ingredients: (i) distributed general purpose convex
optimization, and (ii) the use of randomization to improve the scalability of
kernel methods. Our approach is based on a block-splitting variant of the
Alternating Directions Method of Multipliers, carefully reconfigured to handle
very large random feature matrices, while exploiting hybrid parallelism
typically found in modern clusters of multicore machines. Our implementation
supports a variety of statistical learning tasks by enabling several loss
functions, regularization schemes, kernels, and layers of randomized
approximations for both dense and sparse datasets, in a highly extensible
framework. We evaluate the ability of our framework to learn models on data
from applications, and provide a comparison against existing sequential and
parallel libraries.Comment: Work presented at MMDS 2014 (June 2014) and JSM 201
Scalable and Sustainable Deep Learning via Randomized Hashing
Current deep learning architectures are growing larger in order to learn from
complex datasets. These architectures require giant matrix multiplication
operations to train millions of parameters. Conversely, there is another
growing trend to bring deep learning to low-power, embedded devices. The matrix
operations, associated with both training and testing of deep networks, are
very expensive from a computational and energy standpoint. We present a novel
hashing based technique to drastically reduce the amount of computation needed
to train and test deep networks. Our approach combines recent ideas from
adaptive dropouts and randomized hashing for maximum inner product search to
select the nodes with the highest activation efficiently. Our new algorithm for
deep learning reduces the overall computational cost of forward and
back-propagation by operating on significantly fewer (sparse) nodes. As a
consequence, our algorithm uses only 5% of the total multiplications, while
keeping on average within 1% of the accuracy of the original model. A unique
property of the proposed hashing based back-propagation is that the updates are
always sparse. Due to the sparse gradient updates, our algorithm is ideally
suited for asynchronous and parallel training leading to near linear speedup
with increasing number of cores. We demonstrate the scalability and
sustainability (energy efficiency) of our proposed algorithm via rigorous
experimental evaluations on several real datasets
CoCoA: A General Framework for Communication-Efficient Distributed Optimization
The scale of modern datasets necessitates the development of efficient
distributed optimization methods for machine learning. We present a
general-purpose framework for distributed computing environments, CoCoA, that
has an efficient communication scheme and is applicable to a wide variety of
problems in machine learning and signal processing. We extend the framework to
cover general non-strongly-convex regularizers, including L1-regularized
problems like lasso, sparse logistic regression, and elastic net
regularization, and show how earlier work can be derived as a special case. We
provide convergence guarantees for the class of convex regularized loss
minimization objectives, leveraging a novel approach in handling
non-strongly-convex regularizers and non-smooth loss functions. The resulting
framework has markedly improved performance over state-of-the-art methods, as
we illustrate with an extensive set of experiments on real distributed
datasets
- …